I should begin this all by saying Opa is doing pretty well, all things considered.

More than a week ago, Opa’s housekeeper Sylvia come by for her regular appointed time and found him in a pool of blood on the floor.

He was rushed to the hospital and put into the Intensive Care Unit. I guess his liver decided it was done and was sending the blood back out somehow. Just when they got that under control so he could leave te ICU, he quit breathing. Back into the ICU with a new breathing tube. Oh yeah then he got a blood infection of some kind.

My Opa is 80 and has had a lifelong love of liquor and cigarettes. He smoked 4 packs a day and drank more than the equivalent volume of liquor. I honestly can’t believe he’s made it this long.

Now, I don’t know him very well. Things I remember about him from when I was little:

Mom cried when she talked to him on the phone and felt compelled to explain her relationship to ‘Dad’ to me in incomprehensible sentences

Once, while driving in a car with mom and Opa, he explained that he didn’t want to be anyone’s grandfather, it didn’t feel right to him. So, that’s why he would rather be called Opa…Opa means old man, and he didn’t mind beign someone’s old man. We had never called Opa anything but Opa, so this was another incomprehensible explanation

Once, at his apartment in Vallejo (or was it livermore?) the family was fed on waffles made by mom and lemon sauce that Opa made…”his specialty”

As far as memories of Opa when I was a kid, that is kind of it. Of course I remember how Mom was always upset about him and how he unsettled her.

His drinking caused her the most consternation. She always wanted him to stop drinking. She tried to make a deal with him:
“I will come see you, but you have to promise me that you won’t drink that day.”
And she would go see him, and he would have been drinking. So she would turn around and leave.

Fortunately, this didn’t happen often. We lived to far away. There were four years of my childhood that we lived in the same state, but even then, we were about an 8 hour drive away. So, naturally, we didn’t see him much.

Mom was the oldest. My Grandma and Opa had married, and their little daughter remained their only daughter for a long time…I forget.. I think 10 years before my aunt Donnie appeared. And then next my uncle Marty.

But those were the days of Avalon. Swords had been melted into refrigerators and lawn mowers. The ones who fought in the war deserved their ranch-style with all the modern amenities. They had fought for it, hadn’t they?

And then after all, it turns out they deserved to get divorced. The way mom tells it, everyone up and down the street broke up. And when Mom was 16, her dad, my Opa, flew the coop.

Everything was shiny and new then, they had just invented divorce. People hadn’t worked out the kinks yet. I don’t think “visitation rights” were part of the general vocabulary.

My grandmother was a pretty lady and enough of a charmer to find a new husband since the old one was a dud. And Aunt Donnie and Uncle Marty called Granpa Jess ‘Dad’.

But my mother didn’t. She was already in college when her little brother and sister were learned to call this new man “dad”. Grandma and Grandpa Jess were the ones who send birthday cards and Christmas present. I called them Grandma and Grandpa. Mom called them Mom and Jess.

She is really the only one who remembers Opa as “dad”. She is the only one with any reserve of good memories, of good times together with this man.

Hey, it was the 60’s man! Freedom was in the air! Free love on the lawns of Berkeley or Frank Sinatra in Vegas with the liquor and loose women. Take your pick!

He was an aerospace engineer of somekind. He was making good money and saving the world from communists and space aliens. He was riding high.

But I don’t know. I don’t know what Opa was like before he become too dessicated to walk on his own. I don’t have clear memories of him from even the 80s. Anytime I saw him, I was too distracted by the force field of fear and throbbing of wounds that sprang up around my mother.

Opa was like some elemental, some force of nature. Fascinating to watch in it’s raw state, but like a tornado or hurricane, you couldn’t stay out in it too long or someone one would get hurt.

When I became an adult, I had the desire to reaquaint myself with the extended family I’d never known. My own parents were certianly out of reach, self-exiled to Russia.

I was (and am) intensely curious and somewhat wary about all these cousins and relatives who look and sound eerily like myself. The older ones were the ones who had the missing puzzle pieces, too. They were the ones who might help untwist the thread. So many incomprehensible choices had been made by my parents. The people who knew my parents before I did would have some insight. Or at least maybe they would confirm my assesment that my parents were crazy.

But I needed to know these people.

Let me tell you something about my immediate family. We are very literal. Do not ask if something is possible. If something is possible, it is possible. At high personal cost, death or dismembership, that wasn’t the question. So we will tramp ahead and do the possible thing, when we believe it must or should be done.

When I first came back from Russia, it was possible, though barely, for me to go to California to see my extended family. I saw almost everyone, but I didn’t see Opa.

He had been more or less cast to the wind.

I eventually moved here to California and felt bad about ignoring Opa. He landed in the hospital then, so I went to visit him. He hadn’t seen me since I was 9.

So. Nice to meet you Opa. Yes, this is me, all grown up. And Opa stepped out with inappropriate anatomical comments. SIGH. And there were the recent studies of anything in particular that he had read that he had to tell me, and there was his disinterest and frustration with any topic I might bring up to talk about. Of course, if a man were talking it was different.

And always, the alcohol.

I tried a few times, but after spending one particularly drunken afternoon during which he suggested that he might get a free drink if he pimped me out to the bartender, I just stopped visiting.

I thought, I should not visit him alone. What point would it serve? I’m not even sure if he’s clear on who I am; he’s always confusing me for my mother.

Except last week he was found in a puddle of his own blood. And he’s 80, and maybe this was it. It has been 6 years since I last visited him.

I talked with mom for a while about it. “What do the doctors say? Is he really in danger?”

I thought if there was a funeral, I should go. And I thought, “It would be nice to see everyone.” Which is not such a nice thought. Because, he wasn’t dead yet. And really, if he was still around I should make the effort to go see him.

It would make the funeral easier to enjoy.

So, I drove to see him. And he was doing much better by Tuesday, and even more by Wednesday. We talked for a bit. He was weak and tied to tubes. The alcohol wasn’t there, but he was still inappropriate.

And yet….I actually could see through what was left of him to catch glimpses of who he might have been.

It occurred to me that we have a similar sense of humor. When I told him that my cousin Dallass was having a girl and naming her Adelaide, he started singing a song about Adelaide.

I had thought that too, “Isn’t that a song?” He knew the song and was singing it, which is exactly what I would have done if I’d remembered the song.

He also made silly puns and goofy comments whenever he could.
“Why do little ducks walk softly? Because they can’t walk hardly”

and his favorite (He told it twice)
“Why don’t worms have balls? Becuase they don’t like to dance!”

He also had quirky little things to say in response to people; he liked to twist around the meaning of words. When I told him that I thought mom was crazy for working in Newark and living in Sacramento, he thought for a while and said,
Your mother’s center of gravity is closer to the edge than other peoples’

And then quoted “The road less travelled”
He tried to tell me about a study regarding the mining of helium from Texas (inspired by the balloon I brought him).

It wasn’t much, but I began to see a little bit of the person he had been. I thought, if he had been someone I met, someone my age, I might have really had a good time with him. I always like the smart boys, and have a lot of male friends that I love to verbally spar with. Yes, I could see that he might have been prickly in just that kind of way.

There were a few times when I fired back at one of his retorts. He said, “You catch on. Things don’t get past you.”

That made me feel good. It was then that I realized that feeling, the familiar teasy back-and-forth that I have with some of my friends. It’s the first time I really felt like I got a sense of this man’s personality.

I wish he didn’t make it so hard. I wish that we’d had a chance to know each other. Most of the time during my visit, he was uncertain of exactly which granddaughter I was even though he was glad to have the company.

But I’m glad I took the chance to go see him.

I need to talk for a little bit about where I come from.

I come from Alaska. I did not live in the absolute wilderness, but then again, the wilderness is never far from anywhere in my motherland. Moose wander through the streets, and the streets are literally ice for many months of the years.

The brand-new subdivision that I lived in as a teenager was virgin forest. I mean to say, a lawn was something of a futile absurdity. It made much more sense to leave the trees and bushes alone, and 99% percent of the homes in our area left their acre+ lots in their natural state.

We had a natural well that gave us water. It was ‘hard’ water which meant that the minerals coated our bathtub and left a funny taste when we drank it.

We lived outside a munincipality, the only police where the state troopers and they were seldom seen.

There was a lake full of fish a half mile a way, and our front window showed us a forest reserve that stretched for hundreds of miles long. We liked to pick berries and mushrooms there in the summer.

My parents drove to Alaska. They went their twice from their motherland in the golden rolling hills of California. First, in the 60s before Alaska was a state. Then again, for much longer, in 1972. During the new year’s party, Mom went into labor and produced me in a now-defunct Anchorage Hospital.

Now I live in the golden rolling hills of California. And only very recently, I realized:

Mom and Dad thought Alaska was exotic.

I never never never thought it was exotic. It was home, with all the boringness and familiarity that means. But for them, it was almost like living in a foreign country. It was exciting and new and unexpected almost every day.

Now, Mom and Dad live in Sacramento. They talk a lot about remembering different places around there. Things are the same for them. Things are a lot like how they left them when they went away. Not exactly, time takes its toll, but enough the same for them to remember.

But me, I feel like California is a very exotic place. With its short snowless mountains and lush vegetation, fruit trees and warm nights, its population density and freeways, California never quite fits. It’s always not home.

Not to say I ever want to live in Alaska. I am a permanent ex-patriate.

But I chafe at the expectations. I demand to know “WHY?” and resent every rule or expectation as irrational and irrelevant.

When I bought my condo, as part of the forest’s graveyard of paperwork required, I was given the Rules of the Condo Association. Chris read them with me.

“WHAT?! I can’t put my bike on the balcony.”

“No Pool parties? Who do they think they are?”

“No dog over 40 pounds? Why is that their business? IF I want a dog, it’s my problem.”

Every rule was an imposition. I was buying the home, I should be able to do whatever wherever I wanted. Every rule made me suspicious.

Chris told me, “That’s the price you pay to live in a condo with other people. If you had your own home, you could do what you wanted.”

I signed, muttering and rebelling, but I signed.

Now, I am looking to buy a home! HOoray! I can paint the outside, I can have a BIG dog, I can put my bike wherever I like and all the rules are gone.

Chris and I are buying it together, so, he wants to live in his hometown Claremont. A little tiny city that gives me the jeebies. Back to that in a moment.

We’ve picked a house, made an offer, and are waiting. Chris was telling me what to expect from his home town.

“Claremont does not allow parking in the street overnight. Between 2 am and 6 am, you can’t be on the street without a temporary permit.”

What is this? WHAT?! THEY ARE PUTTING RULES ON ME AGAIN.

See, I am feeling crowded about this already. This town is full of all kinds of customs and ways of doing things. Where I come from, independence is prized and conformity is despised. There is no set way that everyone should be or do.

And yet, this little city has all sort of rules and permit requirements.

But here’s the creepy part that gives me the jeebies:
Everyone from there or associated with that city, thinks that the city is great. They all say what a nice place it is, how wonderful it is for kids and for creative types. It is a college town after all.

And even more than that, everyone I’ve met from there is excruciatingly nice. I mean it! They are smart, and kind, and usually benignly humorous.

Is anyone else hearing the jeebie music in the background? I’ll admit, I’m probably scarred by too many church youth groups. They specialize in niceness, while holding the dagger hidden until your back is exposed.

But I’m uneasily assured of the Claremont niceness. I mean, Chris is more Claremont than anyone, and I’ve been in daily observation of him for more than 5 years. He remains nice.

I just am afraid I will tresspass on the customs or BBQ the sacred cows of this little town of Trees and PhDs. I know there are all these expectation that I am oblivious to, like being colorblind. And I value my independence. I cherish my non-conformity.

They expect me to wash my car whenever dirt is visible on it. Hey, where I come from, you are ahead of the curve if both headlights are working. What do they expect from me?

They will expect lawn maintenance. Lawns! And if there are weeds, I would have to pull them up. I’ve never had anything to do with a lawn. I will probably fail at this.

I could offer lots of advice on removing a car after it’s high-centered on a snow burm. But that is not useful in my exotic new home.

I recognize, intellectually, that with all these people crowded together on paved streets and highways, some rules are needed. But I don’t like it. Rules feel categorically repellent.

It will take some time. I’m not from here.

I remember learning about church history in my protestant church school. The time line went something like this:

God created the earth
God picked Abraham to father the jews and be the chosen people who wrote down what he said
God send Jesus to die and save everybody from the mess humanity had gotten into
The disciples became the apostles, started the church and wrote the new testament
Martin Luther wrote the 95 theses

Sometime after I learned history that didn’t come from born-again-authored textbooks, I realized that things had happened in the church between the first century and the 15th.

The protestant revisionist history had the catholic church sort of erased. As if, before the “real” church, the protestant one, there had been this big empty dark spot.

As I learned more I realized, that’s not true. There were all kinds of things happening, acts of faith and struggles. There were hundreds of years that the faith was preserved by the faithful. I was kind of surprised to realize that.

Now, from 1917 to 1991, communism was in charge of Russia. It was a totalitarian government, and here in the Democracy-loving west, we saw them as gray and robotic. They produced propaganda, and their biggest newspaper was called TRUTH, and they made it the truth by stamping out any other voices.

But I found this amazing book in a used book store: Writers in Russia: 1917-1978
This book explains what the writers were thinking. It talks about how they were excited and embraced the Revolution. That at first, they were inspired and producted good writing regarding their hopes and dreams for the new order.

And then, well, things got funky. All the intelligentsia revolutionaries had envisioned a utopia, a place where everyone would have everything they needed and be free to create.

As it turned out, people sort of had what they needed but they were less and less free to create.

But creative people will create. Their creativity compels them. And what things were happening behind that iron curtain?

THe official story was lockstep uniformity. But unofficially, the Russian people were as hungry for beautiful culture as ever.

This book tells of a really healthy underground publishing community. They would sent out the stories, the poetry, type up multiple copies and mail them out like chain letters. In this way, one officially unpublished poet was once able to pack out a soccer stadium to hear him read his poems.

PACKED OUT A STADIUM FOR POETRY.

I remember how we would hear of the strength of the first century Christian. HOw they were so vitallly involved with their faith. They went to their death in the jaws of lions.

The lack of something makes it so much more precious. THe lack of freedom makes the desire for it unbearable.

Here, we have so much freedom. And what do we do with it? We hardly know what to do with it. We are dilletantes with our freedom of speech. Toying with it…Childishly experimenting.

And yet, would we have it any other way? Freedom means contempt. I can toss off the most foolish nonsense with my power of speech, because it is free. Free is not important, doesn’t require any thought.

The Soviet writers were not automatons. They had truth that tortured them to be told. THey had the highest of formalism to deal with. Leave iambic pentameter aside, try working within the bounds of a capricious and murderous dictator. Stalin was no joke.

And yet, they did it. They worked and crafted and wrote. What an amazing history. It’s blowing my mind to get a glimpse of all these creative minds struggling with their surrounding and how to express themselves.

So…We have a new plan.

Everyone knows that the real estate market in America has shot upwards, for all kinds of reasons.

And I seem to have lucked out on my purchase of a condo here in the middle of LA. It was something of a fixer upper to begin with, but even so I almost didn’t buy it.

See, Chris and I were getting more and more serious…And I just wasn’t sure. “Maybe I should wait until he and I have made some plans about our future together before I commit to a mortgage.”

I stewed about it for a while, eventually deciding that I might resent him for not making a move on a timeline that was entirely invented by me…Etc.

So I bought, and after a year he moved in with me. We are very happy.

And we are both very happy that I bought the place. Because now, it’s worth practically a gazillion dollars more than i paid for it. yay!

So…Chris and I have spent a lot of conversations talking about future plans. And we talked about a little house by the mountains.

He grew up by the mountains.

Me too, but different mountains. His mountains are about 50 miles away, and little houses there are rather reasonable.

When we were talking about getting a little house there, we thought I would have to become employed again. When thinking about what kind of job I would have to have, I got all worried about it.

So I called to find out. Turns out they’ll let anybody borrow money.

AND WE”RE OFF! We’ve run the numbers, we can afford it and everything looks good.

So I’m painting and packing a learning about how to sell a home. Chris is learning about buying a home. It’s all very exciting.

And very familiar. The moving, I mean. I hadn’t realized I’d been here a full two years. Well, two years come August.

Moving is the constant in my life, it seems.

“Chris? How many places have you lived since you became an adult?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“I’ve lived a lot of places. If you don’t count after I moved back home, because that made me not an adult again…Wait! That wasn’t my choice, so dammit, I’ll count it.”

“Sure, that counts”

“Let’s see…”

There was the commune that first summer.
Then back home for the fall
then the Mirnyy one-room flat
then the two room flat
Then Yakutsk, with the other teachers,
then with Lena on the outside of town.
then back to anchorage with my brother
then in Muldoon with crazy roomate Cheryl
Then the next roommate near midtown
then the first place with Jack, for a month
Then the second place with Jack…23rd street?
Then on Spenard
Then to Cupertino to stay with Bryan again
Then we found the place in Sunnyvale (a residence i remained in for tge longest period of my to-date adult life..a very nice place)

then the other place in sunnyvale..Where my brother Chris and Suzanne tag-teamed as roomates…and from which I finally gave up on Jack

then I stayed with my brother Bryan until I got the hot-box in Mountain View

THen I found the place on Taylor in Sunnyvale…where I lived happily as a highly paid consultant and then a college student and then GRADUATE!

And then I moved to LA, to Los feliz. That place was nice. Lived there a whole year

Then I bought this place.

And this summer I will move under the mountains.

Okay, here’s the count:

14 years of adult life
20 residences

That’s a lot of boxes.

When we were in Belgium, President Bush came through. This was covered on the news there.

I know it must have been covered on the news here, too. Knowing what I know about the people and news coverage here, I can assume that the tone towards the president was rather negative.

But there, no one seemed to care that much. As much as we’d seen footage of people protesting the president.

But we didn’t see that there. No one really cared. The news, and there were about 2 channels of news in English from Britain, didn’t have anything particularly to say about it. They projected what sort of things might be said, but the tone was not particularly negative.

The news was actually more concerned about a recall of food that had a possibly cancerous dye.

There were a lot of things in the news that were very different than what we get here. This makes me trust the news even less.

The thing is, it takes a lot of work to keep up with current events. You have to read several newspapers every day.

But for the news you read to make sense, you have to have a body of previously acquired knowledge to rely upon to interpret what is beign said.

And NOW, it seems that the news we read is unreliable, anyway. That we have an america-centric media is no surprise. But even that media seems to be letting us down.

Dan Rather has retired in a scandal. His motto: False but accurate.

Sure, he can determine that his opinion is accurate based on hunches and invented proof?

I don’t appreciate that the people in charge of portraying facts have already interpreted them before they get to me.

And the other latest scandal…Eason Jordan resigned from beign the CEO of CNN. He went to the EU and made allegations about the military killing the embedded journalists while at war in the middle east.

WHAT?! Actually, we don’t know what exactly he said, because the transcript has been supressed.

What we do know is that Eason Jordan has resigned, without addressing the allegation. Also, there has been barely a peep about why he has resigned.

SIGH

As I walk around my town, hearing political talk, I hear about how we can’t trust the government.

BUSH IS HITLER!

I hear things like this as a matter of course, and they are met with cheers and applause.

But I am much more concerned about the media that seems to be ‘deciding’ what we need to know.

We can change what is shown on the networks; we get to take our viewing attention away from different channels. What can we do to protest the mockery of news that is being shown?

I am disturbed by the attitude of “we know best” coming from the news media. I would rather they report the news without these hideos slants.

It’s very discouraging. Frankly, it makes me want to avoid the news altogether.

I started college when I was 17, after I graduated from high school. Jr. College. I had no idea what college was, honestly, except that it was supposed to be more difficult than high school.

So I was worried. High school was easy, but this was the big time. I told my mom I would only take 12 credits so that I didn’t overload. She thought that was stupid, that i needed to take a full load, 15 units, or it would take me forever to graduate.

Forever to graduate.

Let’s see. Jr. College the first semeseter, the University the next.

But then I dropped out to get ready to go to Russia for a semester.

The semester away turned inot a year and a half, three semesters. and when I got back I was flat broke with no parents to mooch off.

I took some night classes. Then I broke free and took a WHOLE SEMESTER of classes. 18 units! Bliss!

THe deal was, I had gotten married to Jack. He said he’d finish his degree in a year, and then I would get to do mine. So I worked and he went to classes.

But he dropped out in the middle. This didn’t make me happy. I wanted my turn! I went to the school to get a definitive answer on what he really needed to finish.

Turns out he wasn’t enrolled in the university. He’d been failing since I met him.

Wow.

Time for a regroup and re route.

We moved to California, because my goofy brother thought we could start a video game business. We didn’t know anything about video game businesses, but we needed to do something different. And I heard that California had good schools. I’d be able to finish my degree there.

Well, the video game thing didn’t go anywhere, but Jack got a good job anyway. And I started to get ready to go to the University of California.

Did you know that you have to apply to enroll in a University?
I didn’t. The University in Alaska did not require such things. California even had deadlines and things, essays and huge forms.

The UC had all these requirements before you could go there. Courses you had to have completed in High school.

Courses I had not completed in High School. Because I was home schooled.

Mad as hell, I went back to the Jr College in California to complete these classes. Deep in a Statistics class, I missed the deadline to apply

ANOTHER year lost.

man, I was depressed. My sister-in-law said, Hey, why don’t you try out for this internship-it’s for NASA!

That sounded pretty cool. I thought maybe I could be a technical writer. That’s what english majors do, right? Write? Or maybe I could be a software tester. You didn’t have to know anything to do that…

I got hired to be a desktop video conferencing tester. The boss later told me he hired me because I knew absolutely nothing, so I would be a good guinea pig to test the software. Then he said I had proved him wrong, and learned a lot.

I really liked it. It was fun and exhilerating to have a real job, not McDonald’s or Wherehouse or in a mall. I was learning things, solving problems, and writing operating instructions.

In the middle of all that excitement, I did finally get accepted into UCSC. I was so excited! And then I was unsure.

I wanted my english degree. Nothing would change that. But I knew that I didn’t want to be a teacher, and that’s the only thing you can do with an english degree.

I had learned to be a techie. I had this hope, that maybe I could go get a real job doing this. Maybe I could make good money. Pursuing my english degree would not pad my wallet.

I decided to look for a real job, and take classes at night. Later.

Later took a while. I had to find another school with night classes.

I took one big corporate job. Then I didn’t feel like I was doing all I could, I found another, and another. In the middle of all that, I lost the husband. Shouldv’e seen that one coming.

I did take night classes. I did. But it takes a lot of nights to make a full year.

So, that last big corporate job I took was a consultancy. I was beig consulted on how to run the system. I was consulted and not informed. This, then that, then the other. Your end date is now, no wait! we need you!

It dragged on, more and more frustrating. At last, my end date came. I reminded them that they needed me.

But I was thinking. I was thinking about what to do. What other jobs were available? none and getting fewer every day. What would happen to me when it was finally my end date?

It was september. maybe I would go to school. i looked to see. It was really possible! What if I went to school full time for a semester? I had enough saved to live on my own. I could do it, if I wanted to.

Boss man says, “your end day is coming. But we need you…Can you stay a few weeks? maybe…”

And I say, no. Not a few weeks. I have to go.

So I went. A semester. And then partway through, I figured out that I only needed one more semester, and I would graduate. I would be done.

It was just that fast! I was done. The right time came, and I weighed the choice. It was what I really wanted. More than a couple more week’s consultant’s pay.

Sometimes, you have to keep your eye on the true goal. It took me 12 years to graduate.

Once I graduated I was free to move away. I didn’t have to stay in the area to finish. I moved away, and lots of other things-good things! are happening.

But I am right now keeping my eye on the goal. Let go of the little stuff to grab the big, you know?